Free Writing in the Dark by David Grossman Page B

silently accept it?
    Perhaps I should ask this question even more pointedly: Am I myself, consciously or unconsciously, actively
or passively, through indifference or with mute acceptance, collaborating at this very moment with some process that is destined to wreak havoc on another human being, or on another group of people?
    “The death of one man is a tragedy,” Stalin said, “but the death of millions is only statistics.” How do tragedies become statistics for us? I am not saying, of course, that we are all murderers. Of course not. Yet it seems that most of us manage to lead a life of almost total indifference to the suffering of entire nations, near and far, and to the distress of hundreds of millions of human beings who are poor and hungry and weak and sick, whether in our own countries or in other parts of the world. We are capable of developing apathy and alienation toward the suffering of the foreigners who come to work for us, and toward the misery of people under occupation—ours, and others’—and toward the anguish of billions of people living under any kind of dictatorship or enslavement.
    With wondrous ease we create the necessary mechanisms to separate ourselves from the suffering of others. Intellectually and emotionally, we manage to detach the causal relationship between, for example, our economic affluence—in the sated and prosperous Western countries—and the poverty of others. Between our own luxuries and the shameful working conditions of others. Between our air-conditioned, motorized quality of life and the ecological disasters it brings about.
    These “Others” live in such appalling conditions that they are not usually able to even ask the questions I am
asking here. After all, it is not only genocide that can eradicate a person’s luz : hunger, poverty, disease, and refugee status can defile and slowly kill the soul of an individual, and sometimes of a whole people.
    There are many terrible things occurring not far from us, for which we are unwilling to take any personal responsibility, either through active involvement or through empathy. It is convenient for us, where the burden of personal responsibility is concerned, to become part of a crowd, a faceless crowd with no identity, seemingly free from responsibility and absolved of blame.
    Perhaps it is only in this global reality, where so much of our life is lived in a mass dimension, that we can be so indifferent to mass destruction. For it is the very same indifference that the vast majority of the world displays time after time, whether during the Armenian Holocaust or the Jewish Holocaust, in Rwanda or in Bosnia, in the Congo, in Darfur, and in many other places.
    And perhaps, then, this is the great question that people living in this age must relentlessly ask themselves: In what state, at which moment, do I become part of the faceless crowd, “the masses”?
    There are a number of ways to describe the process whereby the individual is swallowed up in the crowd, or agrees to hand over parts of himself to mass control. Since we, here, are people of literature and language, I will choose the one closest to our interests and to our way of life: I become part of “the masses” when I give up the right to think and formulate my own words, in my
own language, instead accepting automatically and uncritically the formulations and language that others dictate.
    I become “the masses” when I stop formulating my own choices and the moral compromises I make. When I stop articulating them over and over again, with fresh new words each time, words that have not yet eroded in me, not yet congealed in me, which I cannot ignore or defend myself against, and which force me to face the decisions I have made, and to pay the price for them.
    The masses, as we know, cannot exist without mass language —a language that will consolidate the multitude and spur it on to act in a certain way, formulating justifications for its acts and simplifying